My Dugout, a Blood Bowl App

Blood Bowl has been officially out (again) for over 30h, and one of their more attractive selling points for me is their app: My Dugout.

I played a lot of Blood Bowl as a freshman in college, I used to skip the Physics lectures and go to the student union to play in a regular league, that meant keeping track of my team and what players were injured, and which ones did get a promotion… Now, all that and more is contained in an app. So I am pretty stoked about it, and I bought all of it when it came out last evening.

It is similar to Warroom, which means that it has the basic teams (Humans, and Orcs) for free and anything else has to be bought. So let’s see the two different things we can purchase:

I suggest the Death Zone Team Manager as a must buy since it adds the capabilities of creating teams from other races. It is only $3.99. Buying the rules is more optional on my opinion, I prefer to actually have a book.

Now that we have bought the DZTM, we can proceed at building a team, so let’s see the building interface:

For fun sake, I will build my classical wood elf team on the app, so I go ahead and select my lineman, catchers, throwers, wardancers and my treeman! When selecting a player you get to name it, or you can leave the app to generate a random name for him. Also, you can click on any of their skills to know what they mean:

Alright, that is actually pretty cool, you can make your own team for a league and keep track of everything: player’s promotions and injuries, plus team budget. At the same time, you can make one team for a single game.

The app also helps you manage a match, so I decided to give it a try and took my tree-whisperers to an imaginary game, the app helps keep track of the weather, the number of attendees, hiring a player for that game or buying re-rolls.

While the game is on, you can keep track of what player scored a touchdown, knocked someone out, caught an interception and so on. Even when your player gets knocked out, it has the injury table build in.

Finally, after the game is over, the app will identify what players are getting new skills and will help you out on the roll for that.

In conclusion, I have to say that I like the app. $3.99 for all the players is not that bad, and it is probably on the cheaper side for a GW product and the app usability for single games and league tracking makes it an indispensable tool for the casual player. Probably the competitive player too but we have to see how the competitive scene of a GW’s Blood Bowl shapes up.